The last few weeks have been crazy at sumHR. Not only have we been busy at work to ensure that our users get more flexibility with basic HRM functions, we’ve also made a lot of improvements to the site. We now wanted to share the news that Attendance 2.0 is live and we’ve launched and started shipping the biometric systems. In addition, a Roster page has been introduced on sumHR for better employee management.

Attendance 2.0: Completely Revamped Attendance Module

The previous avatar of the sumHR attendance module had a couple of areas which received a lot of feedback and needed enhancements:
a) Ability to handle high volume attendance logging, resulting in frequent bugs/errors/issues.
b) Critical limitations in design that restricted scaling up the shifts/policies as teams grew bigger.

With Attendance 2.0, we’ve not only improved upon the above two points, but also added a bonus item – seamless integration of biometric fingerprint readers and RFID access machines. The new attendance module provides the following features:

1) Separate Shift and Policy Management
Earlier, there was just one way to create, log, and track attendance for employees in sumHR – through “shifts”. The shifts feature included the attendance policy options as well. This limited the flexibility an HR/admin would need when they’d like to assign different attendance rules, for people coming within the same shift, or vice versa. Hence, now we have provided separate options to create shifts and policies, individually. You can create unlimited number of shifts and policies, both separately, independent of each other.

2) Weekly Offs or Weekly Off Cycles
In our earlier setup, you had the option to define weekly offs at Department level. This was like a blanket rule which restricted the option for you to assign different weekly offs for different people within the same department. Not only that, you also didn’t have the option to create more variations in the weekly offs, such as alternate Saturdays, even/odd days, first/last Saturdays, etc. Now, you can create unlimited unique weekly off cycles, separately. They are no longer linked to departments. This means, you can create and assign different weekly off cycles to people from the same department. What’s more, these weekly off cycles no longer have to be plain vanilla types Saturday off. They can be alternate, odd, even, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – and not just Saturdays, you can configure it for any day of the week.

3) Shift Assignment & Weekly Off Cycles at User/Employee Level
Previously, when you created shifts, you had to also define “who is this shift for” in the same process, right there itself. Though it was a powerful method of assigning shifts, it didn’t allow exclusions. So, if you assigned a shift to the “Marketing department”, you’d end up including everyone in that department within the same shift. What if you’d like to assign 9 out of 10 people from the marketing team in that shift, but not that one person. You couldn’t. Hence, we decided to move out the shift assignment into the “Directory” – at end user/employee level. Now, you can create as many shifts, policies, IP networks, weekly off cycles, etc. as you want, all in the manage/administration section, and then assign them to employees from the Directory – in any combination, individually or in bulk.

Launch of Biometric Time & Attendance Monitoring Device

This is kind of a milestone for sumHR. Being an online software company, it was always going to be challenge creating a desktop application and then integrating a hardware system with it – in order to sync stuff onto our online software. But we took the challenge up for the sake of our passion – solving problems in HR.

Device Details
Depending on your requirement, we provide a biometric device without access control (X990). This biometric time attendance system will have the ability to store 3,000 fingerprint templates and 1,00,000 transaction records, and even offer battery backup options.

Benefits of Biometric Devices
Basically, now companies can not only use the web-based clock-in/out system which comes in-built in their sumHR Accounts, but they can also integrate biometric fingerprint reader devices which will be implemented/deployed at their own office premises. These devices which we provide have been carefully chosen after R&D to ensure they’re the best suitable for this job. Using the biometric device, you can ensure practically 100% proof of attendance (which was still a bit dicey in the online system).

How It Works
Once you purchase the device, we will ship it to your office address. Once you have the biometric system, using remote desktop we will set it up to work on your office LAN. Then we will also install a small desktop-based application on a PC/Laptop in your office. This desktop app will communicate and retrieve all attendance logs from the device, and push it up into the cloud – onto your sumHR account.

Roster Page

Regardless of the size of the company, an HR manager always needs to have data at his/her fingertips. To better enable Admin users of sumHR to have easy access to information for faster analysis, we’ve created the Roster page. What it basically does is allow you to swiftly view, search and manage employee data of different rosters, at department levels, as per designations, locations, and employee type. The Roster page can be accessed by logging into your sumHR account and clicking on Roster (third on list, after Directory) on the left navigation bar.

Usage examples:
1) You want to know the leave summary of all engineers in your company.
– Select Leaves Summary (under Leaves Roster) from the first dropdown and Engineers (under Designation) from the second dropdown menu.

2) You want to know the birthdays of all employees in your Kolkata office.
– Select Birthday Roster from the first dropdown menu and Kolkata (under Locations) from the second dropdown menu.

The new attendance features, launch of biometric devices, and the roster page will make your sumHR experience better and efficient. We *heart* feedback. If you have any, do share it with us via the comment section below or drop in a mail.

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Jay Thaker

Jay is the Chief \”Go-To\” Officer at sumHR. He spearheads sales, support, product management and all things \”creative\”. Before this, he\’s worked in the startup teams at Burrp! and Directi.com. He loves writing whenever he gets the chance. Most often his writing will talk about sumHR, startups, leadership, motivation, inspiration and of course, HR best practices.

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The HR realm is progressing rapidly and one needs to stay updated with the latest industry drifts and best practices. SumHR is an HR software that can help to implement automated tasks to ease the effort and get rid of complicated manual functions. It is simple, affordable and powerful payroll software that is easy to implement and light on the pocket.